Spelling it as the president spells it -- Barack -- shows a jump from nonexistent to "something" right around 2009. I wouldn't go so far as to call it noise because it's more than just coincidence, but it's still only ~0.003% of the male population born that year. (60 births/(0.5*4,000,000 total births).
Peculiarly, there were dozens of instances of boys named Sue prior to Shel Silverstein writing "A Boy Named Sue", which makes me suspect that the song in question might very well have been a true story.
Curiously, the popularity of naming boys "Susan" [0] also peaked more than half a decade before the song was published. ("Sue", in contrast, peaked even earlier in the mid-40's, though it seems it made a comeback in the late-80's).
More interesting than it might first appear. If you try a name like 'Stanley' you can see the devastating effects of the war years. You also see a resurgence in the name 20 years or so later, I'd guess when people want to remember a parent or grandparent in their own child.
It's easy to see why names such as "Buzz" have the curves that they have (space race), but it's hard to trace any event that influenced more common names. For example, check "Jacob", "Justin". Does anybody have an idea as to why these curves have this shape?
The Jacob and Justin rises correlate very well with the baby-boomer generation beginning to have children.
It's interesting to note that the increase in the use of Justin has a matching (if slightly lagging) increase in literature[1], while the increase in Jacob isn't[2].
Amy and Sarah were two of the most popular girl's names when I was growing up.
My wife dug in her heels pretty early in the pregnancy for a name that I later learned was a character on a TV show. Judging by the site, she's not the only one. The peak is still under a hundred, so not as embarrassing as, say, characters from 90210.
Bob Green years ago wrote about going to the "Linda Hop", a convention of boomer women all named Linda. The article traced the name back to a song popular in the early 1950s. As far as male v. female, it seems more common to name sons after fathers than daughters after mothers.
Jeremiah (http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...) has an interesting rise in the 70s, but then disappears in the 80s (like so many things) but comes on strong again by the 2000s. The double humps doesn't seem to appear all that often, even clicking on the other examples in these HN comments, some of which appear to show spikes but are still normalish humps, not bimodal.
Another explanation, slightly more flattering to the parents, occurs to me: the popularity may owe something to the movie "Jeremiah Johnson", which came out about then.
What surprised me is that quite a few old-timey-sounding, probably-Biblical names ("Jebediah", "Ezekiel", "Jeremiah", "Abraham", "Noah") were either practically non-existent or otherwise rather unpopular 50 years (and further) back from the present.
Ha! I got my own name when I first landed on the site. For a second there I thought the real story was that they'd somehow exploited a third party cookie but it appears to be a coincidence.
I legally changed my name last year, so I have the fortune of having two sets of names to play with.
Here are my observations (note that I'm not actually posting my deadname here, but I'll still post my thoughts on it):
Old first name: My parents were spot on. I'm well within the typical age, and the median year was only four years off from my birth year. It had a very high spike in the 70s and 80s, and it's since gone down to 1970 levels and stayed there.
Old middle name: On the other hand, my parents gave me an old man's name. The age range starts at 47, and I'm 30. It peaked in the early '60s and was a curiosity by the time I was born.
New first name (Amy): I'm a little off here, but not by much. I'm only a year outside the typical range. When I was born, it had already been in decline for a few years, but it had far from bottomed out yet.
New middle name (Jessica): Spot on. Median age is only three years away from my actual birth year, and I was born really close to the peak. Oddly enough, when I was putting together my new name, I originally wanted Jessica to be my first name, but I ended up changing my mind and making it my middle name because I liked Amy better. Shame it crashed so hard in the last few years.
Actually, I'd say your parents were spot on with both your first and middle name, because middle names are usually picked in honor of someone in their or their parent's generation (usually a relative).
The other thing is for the "classiest" names (ie most fashionable) you want to be at the head of the trend not at the height of popularity as it's become "common" by then.
Funny thing is, I went back and forth so much. I could've very easily ended up with a much less common middle name.
After choosing "Amy" over "Jessica" for my first name, it took me a while to settle on a middle name. For a while, I wanted it to alliterate and very nearly chose "Abigail" (which was uncommon when I was born but is very common now). Then, I decided I wanted something truly uncommon and nearly decided on "Sunset" (it isn't even in the name database here, so I guess it was more uncommon than I thought!). Ultimately, I began to regret not picking "Jessica" as my first name, so I made it my middle name.
No regrets, though. My new initials form a tri-ligature, so I'm really glad I went with it.
I'm not comfortable giving my old and new names, or my year of birth, BUT I can share that my first and last names before transition were very female (I've never met a guy with either of them) and my post transition first and last names are very male (although my first name often has female versions). All of my names have been family names, with minor spelling changes because of language changes as ancestors migrated to the U.S.
Old first name:
- as female: the peak, of over 20,000, was a decade after I was born, stayed there approximately 15 years and has had a slow decline since
- as male: actually follows a similar curve, but the peak was only over 100
Old middle name:
- as female: the peak, of over 10,000, was between the World Wars, went through a steady decline until a decade before my birth, when it went into a sharp decline
- as male: the peak, of over over 25, was a few years after peaking as a female name, then went through a steady decline until 20 years before my birth and has leveled out at 10+ a year
New first name:
- as male: first peak, of over 10,000, was around my birth, then went through a small dip and peaked again a couple decades later
- as female: similar to the male curve with the two peaks breaking 50 a year
New middle name:
- as male: the peak, of over 2,000, was between the World Wars, went through a sharp decline until just after WWII, when it leveled out for a couple of decades, then went through another sharp decline before leveling out around my birth.
- as female: extremely sporadic, mostly due to the low numbers of women getting this name; the range went from just over 20 in one sample year to none for almost 20 of the sample years
Hmm... I didn't even think about running my names as the other gender. I ran my old names as male and my new names as female.
I hadn't heard of any of them except my old middle name being gender-neutral, and even in that case, I've only ever heard of one woman with my old middle name (nobody I know, either; she's a famous actress). Kinda feel sorry for all the dudes out there named Amy (well, unless they're really trans girls, but that's statistically so unlikely)... at least boys named Jessica can go by Jessie.
Comparing across genders now, the patterns are actually similar across genders, just with fewer numbers. My old middle name though, for girls, is very spiky with lots of very short ups and downs, while as a boys' name, the graph was smoother. I wonder if that correlates with the release dates of a certain actress' movies. Also, by far and above the most common of the four across gender lines was my old first name... it was the only one that ever broke 300 (and only barely).
I think most people are more interested in the absolute numbers for each year. There aren't any conclusions being presented from the data, so it isn't a huge problem. It also doesn't vary so much:
Some strange looking mortality on low volume names, I used Irish names, Male-Darragh, Female-Clodagh.
E.g Clodagh goes from 13 to 5.5 between 2009-2010
I don't think a drop reflects mortality, only in popularity as a baby name--the graph is showing you how many new people with that name were added to the total pool over time.
Yup. I'm not from US. And also my name is uncommon too. Even in my country. You know what, I didn't see enyone who has my name so far. I think I have a pretty unique name..!
Funny how the curve fits historical incidents. Searching for "Adolf" and the name gains in popularity in the 1910s and 1920s; dips in the 1930s as Nazism rises; and nosedives in the early 1940s as WWII kicks off. Interesting.
Contrarily, the name "Winston" jumps in the 1940s.
You don't think its as simple as people choosing one of the ten most popular names for a given year do you?
I found it exceedingly accurate with most of the people for a given first name I know being born plus or minus five years of the peak for that name in popularity.
> You don't think its as simple as people choosing one of the ten most popular names for a given year do you?
Maybe, but why do those names become popular? William, Harry, George and Charlotte are obvious (British royal babies) and other names have interesting rises and falls.
I wish they wouldn't have curved/smoothed the graphs. Since it's by year, there are discrete points and values. When you curve a line it has implications for the underlying data, which in this case are incorrect.
I originally didn't smooth the data, but it looked way too jagged and crappy for many of the names. Ultimately, I erred on the side of aesthetics and sacrificed the ability to look up exact numbers in the graph. Rest assured, though, if you want the exact numbers you can download the underlying data of every graph with one of the links under the graph.
Many of the common traditional english names drop off around 1995. Tried a few to find what's taking up the slack. Jack[1] was an unexpected one. Lots of J names in general, but few that pick up around 95.
Much as I admire Randy Olson, there's been a much better version of this around for at least 10 years: Baby Name Voyager. http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
Thank you for the kind words. :-) Although that app you linked is a bit different - it's showing when names were popular over time. This app goes one step further and calculates how many of those people are still alive and makes a best guess at how old someone is based solely on their first name.
Funny how Mael has won quite a lot of hype in the past years (it's still a rare name, sure, but it's much more common now than when I first ...acquired... it).
